The best-selling author of Inside Steve's Brain profiles Apple's legendary chief designer, Jonathan Ive. Jony Ive's designs have not only made Apple one of the most valuable companies in the world; they've overturned entire industries, from music and mobile phones to PCs and tablets.

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader

There have been many books - on a large and small scale - about Steve Jobs, one of the most famous CEOs in history. But this book is different from all the others. Becoming Steve Jobs takes on and breaks down the existing myth and stereotypes about Steve Jobs. The conventional, one-dimensional view of Jobs is that he was half genius, half jerk from youth, an irascible and selfish leader who slighted friends and family alike.

Insanely Simple: The Obsession that Drives Apple's Success

Simplicity isn’t just a design principle at Apple - it’s a value that permeates every level of the organization. The obsession with Simplicity is what separates Apple from other technology companies. It’s what helped Apple recover from near death in 1997 to become the most valuable company on Earth in 2011. Thanks to Steve Jobs’s uncompromising ways, you can see Simplicity in everything Apple does: the way it’s structured, the way it innovates, and the way it speaks to its customers.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

In the spirit of Steve Jobs and Moneyball, Elon Musk is both an illuminating and authorized look at the extraordinary life of one of Silicon Valley's most exciting, unpredictable, and ambitious entrepreneurs - a real-life Tony Stark - and a fascinating exploration of the renewal of American invention and its new makers.

Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired - and Secretive - Company Really Works

If Apple is Silicon Valley's answer to Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, then author Adam Lashinsky provides listeners with a golden ticket to step inside. This primer on leadership and innovation, offers exclusive new information about how Apple innovates. It should appeal to anyone hoping to bring some of that Apple magic to their own company, career, or creative endeavor.

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

Creativity, Inc. is a book for managers who want to lead their employees to new heights, a manual for anyone who strives for originality, and the first-ever, all-access trip into the nerve center of Pixar Animation - into the meetings, postmortems, and "Braintrust" sessions where some of the most successful films in history are made. It is, at heart, a book about how to build a creative culture - but it is also, as Pixar co-founder and president Ed Catmull writes, "an expression of the ideas that I believe make the best in us possible."

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

Amazon.com started off delivering books through the mail. But its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn't content with being a bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become the everything store, offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices. To do so, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that's never been cracked. Until now.

The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson’s revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet. It is destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens. What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail?

iWoz: How I Invented the Personal Computer and Had Fun Along the Way

Before cell phones that fit in the palm of your hand and slim laptops that fit snugly into briefcases, computers were like strange, alien vending machines. They had cryptic switches, punch cards, and pages of encoded output. But in 1975, a young engineering wizard named Steve Wozniak had an idea: What if you combined computer circuitry with a regular typewriter keyboard and a video screen?

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution

Behind the bitter rivalry between Apple and Google - and how it’s reshaping the way we think about technology. The rise of smartphones and tablets has altered the business of making computers. At the center of this change are Apple and Google, two companies whose philosophies, leaders, and commercial acumen have steamrolled the competition. In the age of Android and the iPad, these corporations are locked in a feud that will play out not just in the marketplace but in the courts and on screens around the world.

Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft, and the Battle for the Internet

Digital Wars starts in 1998, when the Internet and computing business was about to be upended - by an antitrust case, a tiny start-up and a former giant rebuilding it. Charles Arthur here examines the differing strategies of the three best-known tech companies in their battle to win control of the exploding network connecting the world. Microsoft was a giant - soon to become the highest-valued company in the world - while Apple was a minnow and Google just a start-up. By February 2012, Apple was worth more than both Microsoft and Google combined.

Google Executive Chairman and ex-CEO Eric Schmidt and former SVP of Products Jonathan Rosenberg came to Google over a decade ago as proven technology executives. At the time, the company was already well-known for doing things differently, reflecting the visionary - and frequently contrarian - principles of founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. If Eric and Jonathan were going to succeed, they realized they would have to relearn everything they thought they knew about management and business.

Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs

Based on over 200 interviews with current and former executives, business partners, Apple watchers, and others, Haunted Empire is an illuminating portrait of Apple today that offers clues to its future. With nuanced insights and colorful details that only a seasoned journalist could glean, Kane goes beyond the myths and headlines. She explores Tim Cook’s leadership and its impact on Jobs’ loyal lieutenants, new product development, and Apple’s relationships with Wall Street, the government, tech rivals, suppliers, the media, and consumers.

Steve Jobs

Based on more than 40 interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry

Losing the Signal is a riveting story of a company that toppled global giants before succumbing to the ruthlessly competitive forces of Silicon Valley. This is not a conventional tale of modern business failure by fraud and greed. The rise and fall of BlackBerry reveals the dangerous speed at which innovators race along the information superhighway.

Design Like Apple: Seven Principles for Creating Insanely Great Products, Services, and Experiences

Design Like Apple uncovers the lessons from Apple's singular approach to product creation, manufacturing, delivery, and customer experience. Learn how design can create a competitive advantage by delivering beauty, ingenuity, and charisma. Get guidance on how to nurture taste, talent, and a design culture at every level of your organization.

The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was a remarkable man who wanted to unify the world through technology. For him, the point was to set people free with tools to explore their own unique creativity. Chrisann Brennan knows this better than anyone. She met him in high school, at a time when Jobs was passionately aware that there was something much bigger to be had out of life, and that new kinds of revelations were within reach. The Bite in the Apple is the very human tale of Jobs's ascent and the toll it took.

Scrum

By the man who helped invent the red-hot management process known as "Scrum", Scrum unveils what is wrong with the way we currently do work, and how a simple set of principles, applied in exactly the right sequence, can accelerate productivity and quality as much as 1200 percent. Scrum (which gets its name from the formation in rugby in which the whole team locks its arms to gain control of the ball) is the reason that Amazon can launch a new feature on its website every day.

Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything

The creation of the Mac, in 1984, catapulted America into the digital millennium, captured a fanatic cult audience, and transformed the computer industry into an unprecedented mix of technology, economics, and show business. Veteran technology writer and Newsweek senior editor Steven Levy zooms in on the great machine and the fortunes of the unique company responsible for its evolution. Loaded with anecdote and insight, and peppered with sharp commentary, Insanely Great is the definitive book on the most important computer ever made. It is a must-have for anyone curious about how we got to the interactive age.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them. It's easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1.

The Design of Everyday Things

First, businesses discovered quality as a key competitive edge; next came science. Now, Donald A. Norman, former Director of the Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of California, reveals how smart design is the new frontier. The Design of Everyday Things is a powerful primer on how - and why - some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them.

Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

When Yahoo hired star Google executive Mayer to be its CEO in 2012 employees rejoiced. They put posters on the walls throughout Yahoo's California headquarters. On them there was Mayer's face and one word: HOPE. But one year later, Mayer sat in front of those same employees in a huge cafeteria on Yahoo's campus and took the beating of her life. Her hair wet and her tone defensive, Mayer read and answered a series of employee-posed questions challenging the basic elements of her plan.

The Virgin Way: Everything I Know about Leadership

While building the Virgin Group over 40 years, Richard Branson has never shied away from seemingly outlandish challenges that others (including his own colleagues on several occasions) considered sheer lunacy. He has taken on giants like British Airways and won, and monsters like Coca-Cola and lost. Now Branson gives an inside look at his strikingly different swashbuckling style of leadership.

Alibaba's World: How a Remarkable Chinese Company Is Changing the Face of Global Business

In September 2014, a Chinese company that most Americans had never heard of held the largest IPO in history - bigger than Google, Facebook, and Twitter combined. Alibaba, now the world's largest ecommerce company, mostly escaped Western notice for over 10 years, while building a customer base larger than Amazon's and handling the bulk of ecommerce transactions in China. How did it happen? And what was it like to be along for such a revolutionary ride?

Publisher's Summary

Jony Ive's designs have not only made Apple one of the most valuable companies in the world; they've overturned entire industries, from music and mobile phones to PCs and tablets.

But for someone who has changed the world as much as he has, little is widely known about Apple's senior vice president of industrial design. Unlike his former boss and creative partner Steve Jobs, Ive shuns the spotlight. Naturally shy and soft-spoken, he lets his work speak for itself and concerns himself only with his craft.

In the first book to focus on Ive, Leander Kahney offers a rigorous and systematic examination of a remarkably creative career and provides insight into the principles underlying Ive's success.

Having covered Apple as an editor since the 1990s and interviewed Ive on numerous occasions, Kahney offers a unique perspective on how this man designs killer products that attract fanatically loyal customers.

In short, it is not his story, it is a story about him. Most of the book is about telling the resume of this great artist. The story is told in third person most of the time and you don't get the feeling you are being entered into his mind, or understand who the person is. It tells the story of Apple, and it tells the story of how Jony got there, but not how Jony felt in certain occasions, or what went through his mind during different challenges. I was hoping to get more first person insight into his world, but it is okay of a book.

I didn't know this wasn't an authorized biography. I did note that it was short in length, but I was eager to learn more about the lead designer at Apple.

I got a long list of accomplishments and insight on what he did and what was done but bottom line is I still don't feel like I know what he's like as a human being. Even little facts - I would expect to be able to know things like, what was his starting salary at Apple? I did learn that he made something like 50 million once... but where did he start? What was his first meeting with Jobs like?

There are some good observations - particularly I enjoyed the sequence of manufacturing iphones/imacs, detailing from the aluminum billet, the laser drilling, painting, etc. There are about 2 parts where the manufacturing detail is laid out. Apple doesn't disclose it, but it seems Kahney got some sources and also intuited some of it out. Painting, thermal expansion, tooling, properties of plastic vs glass vs aluminum, all of these are things I hadn't thought about.

Very much missing are nice anecdotes, like the ones in Isaacson's "Steve Jobs," that could really give Ive a depth of character. If you read Isaacson's book, you might remember the bit about somebody seeing Steve in his Porsche shouting on the phone - "make it more ____ing BLUE!" or some other great tidbit that gave you insight into his character. Nothing there, and I missed it. For example, Ive and Rubenstein would yell at each other. What did they yell? did they curse? were they funny? No quotes. And then supposedly Rubenstein got fired by an ultimatum, "he goes or I goes," but that's delivered more as a hearsay rather than a direct quote.

Where does Jony Ive rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

It was great. One of the best in the last couple of years

What was one of the most memorable moments of Jony Ive?

A lot of insights from this book: Design trumpeting engineering was a defining moment for Apple. Jony's focus on simplicity is a lesson that can be applied to any business.

Which character – as performed by Simon Vance – was your favorite?

Guess??? Jony Ive!!!

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Not really.

Any additional comments?

Really enjoyed this audiobook. It gives lots of insights about what have made Jony Ive spectacularly successful. Lessons you can apply to your own business. The narrator performance was also impeccable.

I learned that a designer's single minded perfection in design implementation revolutionized manufacturing technology not simply by drawing a minimalist and intuitive product but also by fundamentally understanding materials,craftsmanship and production workflow.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

When I realized that Jony Ive may have been the the apple seed that we could not have lived without.

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